The Obligatory 1,000 Followers Post!

I have no idea how this has happened, but I now have a thousand followers on Steemit.

I haven’t done a lot of milestone posts, but one I did at the 150 followers point still rings true:

150 followers, and so many questions! I could almost understand if a half dozen people had stumbled onto my posts and accidentally clicked the Follow link, but 150 of you having done so suggests that some form of mass delusion has occurred due to food poisoning, wardrobe malfunctions, or buggy software. A hundred and fifty people have looked past the fact that I've posted all over the map with a scattershot randomness? Is Follow the spelling of a word in some non-English language that would loosely translate as “Click here to make this person go far, far away”?

All these months later, and I still don’t get it. Who are all these people? Where are all these people? Especially among newbie Steemians, there’s a misplaced emphasis on trying to gain followers, sometimes to the point of an obsession. But I’ve said more than once that I’d trade a hundred followers for one engaged reader in a heartbeat. So I’ve got a supposed 1,000 followers. Subtract from that several hundred “dead followers” who haven’t been active on the site for X period of time. But depending on the time period used, that would still leave at least 600-800 nominal followers. Precious few of whom ever even read one of my posts, let alone comment and/or vote on it.

Oh, I know, we all have busy lives. But why even bother to click that follow button if you’re not going to read that person’s ramblings at least sporadically. Most of my posts get only a few dozen reads, and fewer votes. In 9+ months here, I’ve had maybe a few posts that garnered over a hundred reads but, I think, none that have made it into triple digits for votes.

Meh. I’m not a whale who can dole out $400 upvotes. I didn’t join Steemit with an instant base of dedicated YouTube viewers. And I sure as hell don’t have a niche. There are quite a few Steemians who market their “brand” quite well; I’m not one of them. But that’s okay. A few engaged readers here and there, and all is well with the world. I’m having a blast at Steemit. I firmly believe that this site in particular and the Steem ecosystem in general will do very, very well going forward.

But I do have milestones that mean a lot more to me than X number of followers. Maybe it’s just vanity, but I like that my Reputation number has been growing slowly but steadily. I must be doing something right.

And then there’s Steem Power. Oh yes, I like those milestones. @taskmaster4450 has written several posts about the 1KSP initiative, to get a bunch of Steemians past the 1,000 Steem Power mark, which he sees as potentially life-changing wealth for people if the Steem blockchain goes mainstream. I’m doing my little part for 1KSP, having “adopted” @eaglespirit and upvoting her posts on a regular basis.

So I guess that the upcoming milestone that I’m looking forward to is the 10,000,000 vests that will make me a dolphin. Probably a month or so from now?

But in the meantime, I need to work on being a better follower of those that I follow. And start adding to that list.